China, Russia and Saudi Arabia set to be voted onto UN Human Rights Council

People wearing masks stand during a rally to show support for Uighurs and their fight for human rights in Hong Kong

Credit: AP

China, Russia and Saudi Arabia are expected to be elected to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday, a move critics likened to letting “a gang of arsonists into the fire brigade.”

The trio, along with Cuba, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, are vying for 15 board seats on the 47-nation council and are thought to have enough support to win the vote.

Critics said electing the world’s worst rights violators would be a major blow to the already-anaemic body’s integrity.

Human Rights Watch called on UN member countries, including Britain and the European Union, not to vote for China and Saudi Arabia, two of the most abusive governments. They added that Russia’s numerous war crimes in the Syrian conflict made it another highly problematic candidate.

People hold banners of Jamal Khashoggi during a symbolic funeral prayer for the Saudi journalist, killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October

Credit: AFP

Cuba and Russia have no competition in their regional blocks, which vote on Tuesday in a secret ballot. While technically they still must obtain 97 positive votes, in practice their election is virtually certain.

The Asian regional group is the only one being contested, with five candidates vying for four available seats. But because China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are so powerful at the UN it is almost certain they will be elected as well.

While the council has long been criticised by NGOs — and is seen as increasingly toothless in the face of power rivalries at the United Nations — it is one of few remaining ways to directly confront repressive regimes.

“It’s logically absurd and morally obscene that the UN is about to elect to its top human rights body a regime that herded one million Uighurs into camps, arrested, crushed and disappeared those who tried to sound the alarm about the coronavirus, and suffocated freedom in Hong Kong,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based monitoring NGO UN Watch said.

“Saudi Arabia carried out a record 184 executions in 2019. Russia assassinates journalists and poisons dissidents. Cuba is a police state,” said Mr Neuer.

"It’s quite an embarrassment that Saudi Arabia may end up ‘elected’ to the Human Rights Council simply because its running in an uncontested slate for the Asia region," said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a group set up in a honour of assassinated Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

"That’s fitting for Saudi Arabia of course, given the absence of any elections for the country’s leaders, but it should be scandalous for the Human Rights Council," she told The Telegraph.

Yang Jianli, the president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China and a former political prisoner, said other members had a duty to vote against Beijing.

“China was involved in the annihilation of political freedom in Hong Kong," he said. "By any standards China has grossly abused the UN human rights founding principles.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza, Russian opposition activist, said in a video statement: "For those of us in the Russian democracy movement…we still find it astonishing that the regime of Vladimir Putin is even allowed to stand for a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council let alone that it looks likely to win an uncontested ballot on Tuesday,” pointing to the recent nerve agent poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny as well as the 2015 assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.

“We have hundreds of political prisoners in Russia today… We have not had a free and fair election in two decades.”